Likes UP: Does the HEADLINE Cause You to Like or +1 without even reading the content?

Excerpt:

For Young People, the Headline is Enough

The study also provides some interesting details about how students interact with these snippets of news and information:

“Students now get their news in chunks of 140 characters or from Facebook posts. Think Dickens’ serializing of his novels; that’s the way news comes to students. And if a chapter or two are lost along the way, well, the students don’t bother to go back – nor do they often click into the shortened URLs embedded in the 140-character messages.

“…most students across the world have neither the time nor the interest to follow up on even quite important news stories – unless they are personally engaged. For daily news,students have become headline readers via their social networks. They only learn more about a story when the details or updates are also served up via text or tweet or post…students see the de facto text-message-length headlines as sufficiently informative for all but the most personally compelling events.

Creating headlines that suffice in and of themselves–In most cases, readers aren’t going to click the link. That means the headline has to do critical work by itself: conveying the message, selling the brand, spreading the word.

Writing headlines and blurbs that get the click–At the same time, the goal (as with ad copy) is to get the click. Writing posts will become much more like writing ad copy. They must give users a compelling reason to open the content.